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Fox News may be the dominant cable news channel by far. Its executives may be the subject of intense scrutiny whose every move is watched carefully and who inspire massive biographies. Its on-air talent may dominate headlines for days on end merely by discussing Santa Claus.

Despite all that, New York magazine columnist Frank Rich posited a provocative theory in the title's latest issue. Fox News, he wrote, is in terminal decline:

In truth, Fox News has been defeated on the media battlefield—and on the political battlefield as well. Even the 73-year-old wizard of Fox, Roger Ailes, now in full Lear-raging-on-the-heath mode as ­portrayed in my colleague Gabriel ­Sherman’s definitive new biography, "The Loudest Voice in the Room," seems to sense the waning of his power. The only people who seem not to know or accept Fox’s decline, besides its own audience, are ­liberals, including Barack Obama, whose White House mounted a short-lived, pointless freeze-out of Fox News in 2009, and who convinced himself that the network has shaved five points off his approval rating.

But Rich opined that the network's ratings mask more existential problems, including a rapidly aging, overwhelmingly white, politically cocooned audience, the rise of the Internet as a dominant form of communication, and what he called Fox News's "inability to navigate the conflict between the party Establishment and the radical base that is dividing the conservative ranks." That theory becomes more persuasive if you accept the narrative that many, including Sherman and CNN chief Jeff Zucker, posit: that Fox News exists more as a political operation than a news channel.

Yeah, Fox News is dying. This is why their viewership is nearly twice what the other networks are combined. However, what's sad is that BSNBC is gaining viewership while CNN is dying. BSNBC had nearly 3 times the viewers than CNN in prime time for 1/23: http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/201...3-2014/231641/. Now the only place where Fox is losing viewers is during Greta's show at 7pm but it's still twice that of BSNBC.

Frank Rich is a former drama critic who graduated to writing opinion pieces for the NY Times when they decided that the one thing that politics needed was analysis by a guy with an encyclopedic knowledge of showtunes and Broadway gossip. He's now at New York Magazine doing the same thing that he did at the times, which is spinning wishful thinking as fact. He's one of the reasons that nobody takes the Times seriously.